


Stable Song

by sakurashakedown



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Death Cab for Cutie, M/M, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-18
Updated: 2015-05-18
Packaged: 2018-03-31 01:38:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3959569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sakurashakedown/pseuds/sakurashakedown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>By lunch time it all comes down to just one more thing; one last run through the neighborhood before they take off -forever this time. </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stable Song

**Author's Note:**

> Just an old little fic brought over from my livejournal :)

 

  
Time for the final bow  
Rows of deserted houses  
All our stable mates highway bound  
Give us our measly sum  
Getting the air inside my lungs is heavenly  
Starting out with nothing but crippling doubt  
We'll rest easy justified  
Suffered a swift defeat, I’ll endure countless repeats  
The gift of memory is an awful curse  
With age it just gets much worse, but I won't mind  
I won't mind  
I won't mind  
I won't mind  
Stable Song - Death Cab for Cutie

                                                                                   -----<>\-----

 

By lunch time it all comes down to just one more thing; one last run through the neighborhood before they take off -forever this time - just to ensure there’s no survivors getting left behind. Bob, he’s picky about those things, but Frank just chalks it up to his good intentions, mild OCD, and desire to keep a clean and moral conscience in a world where your hometown reeks of rotting flesh and you’ve got to kill your neighbors before they kill you.

Driving slow through the neighborhood with his foot itching to hit the gas pedal - hard - Frank’s following in behind Ray’s jeep and Bob’s now-dead mom’s SUV in his former neighbor’s pickup truck and trailing behind him, like the tagline to a joke, is Pete in his tiny little Mazda MX-5 that’s about the same shade of bright cherry red as the gash on the back of Frank’s hand from where he cut himself crawling out the window. Pete’s ridiculous little sports car, he’s got all his bags sandwiched in there with him.

Gerard is leaned out of Frank’s passenger window with a shotgun and a grin on his face because it’s the, you know, zombie apocalypse of his dreams and even though his mom tried to eat his face three weeks ago, he still sometimes turns to Frank and says, “Okay. So, like, I’m still dreaming, right?” In the back of Frank’s truck is Everything They Have To Live Off Of ‘Til Whenever and whenever Frank thinks about it, he wishes there was more. More bandages, more food, more water, more guns, but what he’s thinking about most right now is all the deserted houses and how empty they all look just sitting there with the lawns still green and the sky all blue and cloudless behind them. Driving past them on the deserted street - brick, wood, plaster, fenced in, not - it’s strangely quiet and, no matter how nice the flowers under the window must have looked weeks ago, they all have this hollowness to them now; the punched-out windows look like the hollowed-out eyes of a skull and the open doors are the empty little slits where the nose used to be.

Frank sees the rotting, bloated corpse of a formerly living living-dead and flashes back to four weeks ago when his mom went out of town to visit a sick aunt and never came back. He still wonders if she got turned or not, or if she’s still just hunkered down somewhere in Rhode Island and staying put like the government said, back when the government was still saying things. He’s got this weird idea that maybe someday he’ll run into her, but, the way things have been going lately with running into people, he’s kinda hoping he doesn’t.

He’s not the only one who’s lost someone though. Three weeks ago, a little after all the chaos started and shortly after Gerard’s mom started getting weird, Gerard’s brother, Mikey, took off with his girlfriend Alicia and this kid, Matt. Gerard said he kept begging him to come, and he almost did, except he ended up staying because he just couldn’t leave without Frankie. According to Gerard, they said something about going north; fucking America and saying hello to Canada. Gerard’s still got the wrinkled up piece of paper in his back pocket with the name and address of some cousin of Matt’s that Mikey gave him.

Brendon Urie, somewhere in the back of Bob’s SUV, got left behind by his family. He just showed up one day after spending the weekend at Ryan Ross’ house and the place was empty. Knocked over chairs, clothes everywhere, cars gone. There was still food on the stove from where someone was making breakfast. Brendon Urie, they’d found him and Ryan holed up in the back of the smoothie shop last night when they were going around raiding stores for provisions.

And Adam Lazzara can’t find Jesse Lacey and he keeps arguing with Fred Mascherino about it in Ray’s jeep and when they found Bert McCracken, he was lying drunk in the street with a head wound from where he fell off the back of his friends’ truck and they were so drunk, they didn’t hear him fall, just kept zooming off towards somewhere.

The caravan turns a corner and pulls up to a little gas station. The door’s wide open and the glass in the windows is shattered behind the black metal bars. Frank and Gerard sit, waiting for a raid team to form. Last night it was decided, when they were fighting their way through a grocery store packed with Rotters, backpacks and shopping carts loaded with canned food and drinks, that they would never again all go on a raid together. It wasn’t necessary. Someone had to be waiting in the car just in case they needed to jet it out of there quickly and four or five people was a heck of a lot easier to keep up with than ten.

Gerard, sitting back down in his seat now, turns to Frank. The clear, white sunlight coming in through the open window puts a halo around him, brings out the green in his hazel eyes, makes him look angelic and soft, just like how Frank always thinks of him. Gerard, he says, “Cigarettes. Coffee. Gum. Oh, yeah, and chips too.”

Frank rolls his eyes. He’ll get the cigarettes and coffee, yeah - and water and band aids and alcohol for cuts - but Gerard likes to smack his gum like a hooker so he can forget about that; Frank’s already on edge from all the drama so he really doesn’t want to put up with Gerard popping gum from now until whenever. Still, he says, “Anything else, princess?” and it’s Gerard’s turn to roll his eyes.

“No, Frank.” Then he gives Frank this big meaningful look that makes Frank’s heart swell and says, “Just be safe, okay. Please, Frankie.”

And Frank nods and hops out the truck and walks around to got stand next to Bob and Ryan and Adam and Bert. He looks over his shoulder and Gerard is seated behind the wheel, looking around anxiously, raven hair tucked behind white ears, and Pete is still stuck in his air locked car, bags and boxes blocking up the windows. Frank reaches behind and pulls the handgun out of his belt; his dad left it behind years ago when he left his mom and his whole life Frank had never thought he’d ever have to use it.

Outside, it’s nice. Warm, but not hot. Clear skies. Quiet, with only the engines of the cars humming. Frank takes a deep breath and the air smells fresh, but it still has that sour undercurrent to it that’s not strong enough to be bad, but still there enough to notice. Still, Frank appreciates it because, for two weeks, until two days ago when Bob found them, he was trapped inside Gerard’s parent’s master bedroom with the door bolted up and all the food they’d moved from the kitchen going sour around them and mixing with the smell of corpses in the living room and them being too nervous to keep a window open for very long because, every time they opened one, all you could hear was screaming and gunfire and moaning.

The day Bob found them, they had their backs to the window and Gerard was reading _The Catcher in the Rye_ out loud, trying to make Frank less nervous, when all of a sudden, something small and hard collided with the window and Frank jumped and Gerard shrieked and dropped his book. Turn around and it’s Bob from high school standing on the front lawn, under the window, waving cautiously. He had Ray with him then and, when he and Gerard stumbled out of the dim interior of the house into the bright light of day, weighed down with bags, Frank had taken the deepest breath he could and thought nothing could smell sweeter.

The raid goes smoothly, easily. There’s just one Rotter and Adam shotguns it to the face before any of them can blink and Frank wonders if that’s his Southern roots coming out of him. For a minute, he pictures Adam and Adam is sitting on the porch of some wooden shack in a rocking chair, chewing tobacco, shotgun in his lap, brown hair shagging to his shoulders.

The store’s already been raided, but not thoroughly, and Frank gets the cigarettes, but can’t find the coffee and has to wonder for a minute if he’ll ever get to taste some again. The thought makes him sad, nostalgic. Bert is rifling through the refrigerated section and Ryan skeleton walking up and down the aisles just picking up whatever’s left on the shelves. In the end, Frank leaves with three packs of cigarettes, two bags of chips, and he gets the gum, against his better judgment.

Back outside, mother hen that he’s blooming into, Bob makes them tally up their pickings. It’s not much, but the past two nights when they were driving around town raiding grocery stores and corner stores, they’ve acquired enough to live off of for at least a few weeks if they ration it properly. It’s the kind of cold comfort Frank’s been getting used to appreciating these past few weeks. Like, yeah, he can’t sleep some nights, but at least he’s got the adrenaline pumping through his veins to make him forget he’s tired.

Back in the truck, first thing Gerard does is lean over and press his dry, chapped lips to the corner of Frank’s mouth. And, yeah, the world may be ending, civilization crumbling, but at least he’s got Gerard.

Frank closes his eyes and leans back as the caravan starts back up again. He feel the truck pick up speed and, when he opens his eyes, they’re approaching the highway. Outside the window, abandoned cars sit in the street and, sometimes, he can see the decapitated body of a Rotter on the side of the road. New Jersey is just speeding past them. This town he’s hated for years just sitting there in ruins.

Frank turns to Gerard and asks, “Where’re we going?”

Gerard, eyes still on the road, he says, “South. For now.” The way he says it, Frank knows Gerard is thinking about Mikey who’s, hopefully, up north somewhere. Frank’s mom, last he heard, she was north too, in Rhode Island. Bert, when he became coherent, was pretty sure his friends were headed north too and Frank just has to ask, “Why?”

Gerard shrugs, “Less people, more guns? Ray said the weather would be easier to deal with in the winter too. He said it’s just practical.”

Frank shrugs too and says, “Makes sense,” because, in a world where nothing makes sense any more, he’s willing to grab onto any type of reason and hold it tight.

Gerard starts biting the nail of his thumb and Frank knows he’s still thinking about his brother so he reaches over, takes his hand from his mouth, and holds it. It’s warm and his thumb is moist from saliva, but Frank doesn’t mind. It’s the closeness that’s all that matters. The skin on skin contact; warm, living skin, Gerard’s skin and the stable feeling it brings. He brings Gerard’s hand to his mouth and kisses the back of it and he knows that they’re going to be okay.

Because, in a world where horror movies have come to life, he still has Gerard.

In a world he can’t even recognize, Gerard hasn’t changed.

And maybe that’s all that matters, maybe he just needs one stable thing in his life to keep going.

Frank looks at Gerard and he smiles and then he closes his eyes and tries to sleep. When he sleeps, he dreams of southern skies and coffee and fresh air and Gerard’s face and when he wakes up, for the first time in weeks he thinks about the world he’s in now and doesn’t mind it so much.


End file.
